Women’s Services

Success Stories

Assuring patient satisfaction can be challenging, particularly when providing care to pregnant women with high-risk pregnancy conditions. As one of the foremost perinatal practices in the country, Minnesota Perinatal Physicians (MPP) acted swiftly to end a significant delay in scheduling ultrasound appointments, and reduced wait times for other visits.
With an aim to improve patient care and experience, the maternal fetal medicine (MFM) specialists at MPP, employees of Allina Health, leveraged Allina’s “Improving Clinical Value” Program—an initiative that has elevated the patient care experience for numerous other patient populations while simultaneously lowering the per capita cost of care for each one.
Results:

$210,000 in increased revenue because of improved access, projected to be $280,000 within 12 months.
20.8 percent relative improvement in no-show rate.
20 percent increase in available ultrasound appointments and an 18.2 percent increase in utilization.

By the age of 60, more than one-third of women in the United States have had a hysterectomy. Healthcare systems across the country are recognizing that a women’s health service line offers a pathway to improving care and decreasing cost for these patients. Having accurate activity-based costing information is necessary to uncover opportunities for clinical practice improvement and cost reduction.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) made the decision to organize Women’s Health as a service line across the entire health system. UPMC fortified this approach with strong and collaborative leadership, an enterprise data warehouse, and an activity-based cost management system. The results:

20 percent reduction in inpatient length of stay for hysterectomies (over a three-year time period)
34 percent reduction in open hysterectomies
28.3 percent reduction in 30-day readmissions for hysterectomies

These results were obtained during a time when this clinical service saw a 25 percent improvement in its contribution margin.

One in three pregnant women give birth via cesarean section in the United States, which is more than double the rate the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends. And instead of decreasing, the overall C-section rate in Washington State increased 73 percent from 1996 to 2009. C-section rates are just one area of maternal care where our practice in the U.S. lags behind the science and knowledge of best practice. MultiCare Health System believes that all of its female patients should experience the same high-quality care across its integrated delivery system. The health of the next generation depends on it.
MultiCare recognized that it had to standardize care across its system to meet quality standards, improve its patients’ experiences and outcomes, and maintain its market share. The health system launched a Women’s Collaborative, the sole purpose of which was to improve clinical care and patient outcomes for women’s services systemwide.
By working with clinicians to implement standards of care, and using analytics to measure performance, the Women’s Collaborative achieved the following:

NTSV (low-risk, rst-time mother) C-section rate 9 percent less than the national average and already below the 2022 national goal of 23.9 percent
Six-point increase in market share for inpatient OB/GYN services
Improvements in care delivery:

Advancing women’s health is a key part of the nation’s healthcare quality improvement and population health management agenda. Mission Health has embarked on a journey to standardize its best practices and develop a more systematic method for collecting and analyzing data related to perinatal care. With an EDW serving as its analytics platform, and a newly implemented clinical improvement model, Mission is able to monitor performance on several evidence-based practices designed to improve maternal and newborn care. Learn how they have sustained a zero elective delivery rate, and how they have reduced the time they spend manually collecting data and calculating rates.

Several regulatory and licensing agencies are focused on Women and Newborn Population Health measures (Healthy People, 2020; the World Health Organization; and The Joint Commission (TJC)). Beginning in January 1, 2014, TJC began requiring hospitals that delivered at least 1,100 infants annually to report their rates of exclusive breast milk feeding. The measure has also been incorporated into Meaningful Use requirements. This healthcare system, like many organizations, couldn’t accurately report their rates. Learn how they used healthcare analytics to optimize their EMR data capture, reduce manual chart abstraction and increased their breast milk feeding rates by 21 percent.

Studies have shown that elective deliveries before 39 weeks increase the risk of newborn respiratory distress as well as increase the rates of C-sections where there is a higher rate of postpartum anemia and longer lengths of stay for both mothers and babies. Payers are partnering with healthcare organizations to lower elective delivery rates. Learn how this healthcare organization reduced their elective deliveries by 75 percent in just six months and received a six-figure payer partner bonus.

Cesarean deliveries have become one of the most common surgical procedures performed in the United States each year. Between 1998 and 2008, the rate of cesarean delivery in the United States rose by 50 percent — from 22-33 percent of all births. Many healthcare stakeholders have turned their attention to reducing this rate for clinical, financial and regulatory reasons. Read how this healthcare system developed a Women and Newborn’s population health registry and discovered they had to start first with addressing their healthcare data quality issues.

Addressing The Joint Commission (TJC) core measures is a challenge for healthcare organizations. Hospital EMR data issues are well known by quality and patient safety, and clinical quality improvement clinicians. Read how this healthcare organization is using their healthcare enterprise data warehouse and clinical analytics to establish accurate baseline measures and ongoing near real time performance tracking for their TJC perinatal core measures.